


Visions

by Lyricaris



Series: Harbinger's Harmony [1]
Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26097514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyricaris/pseuds/Lyricaris
Summary: Young Nerissa sees, in her sleep, horrors that she cannot comprehend. But then they come true.Some snapshots of Nerissa as a child; her backstory before the events of TUC.
Series: Harbinger's Harmony [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1894822
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Visions

_A torrent of water flooded Nerissa’s small stone bedroom. Frothing, rolling waves crept past the windows and she was suddenly drowning, thrashing, swallowing mouthfuls of water while she clawed for the surface. It was no use; in the next moment, another wave crested over her head and slammed into her. She was tumbling for a moment, buffeted by the current, directionless, feeling only cold darkness and a peppery choking burn in her lungs. Thrashing, she opened her eyes and was suddenly breathing again, coughing and taking in great lungfuls of air._

_The scene had changed. Her room had disappeared, and she was standing on the top of a dike. The stone was a faded grey, crumbling. She was dripping wet, bent over and spitting up the grimy water. As she watched, another wave tumbled through the sluice gates beneath her. The rats standing in the plain below were bowled over, tails and fur tumbling over and over. Regalians on bats overhead started flying upwards, a horde of wings and desperate passengers trying to escape the tide. An orchard of trees with golden apples were swept sideways, bending and snapping as the water descended. The stone rumbled beneath her, and the walls of the dike began to crack. Water was leaking through, first soaking the wall and then breaking it. Twenty feet of roaring water crashed into the plain, rushing toward cave entrances. The screaming rent the air, incessant: flyer and human, gnawers and their pups. The loudest cry came from tall Underlander on a large silver bat as they dove together; he grabbed for the floundering bodies, but they tumbled out of his grip—_

Nerissa threw her blankets aside, leaned over the bed, and threw up mouthfuls of bile onto the floor.

A nanny was suddenly at her side, comforting the trembling child as the gasped for breath. A warm towel was dabbed around her face to clean off the sick as someone else tended to the floor. Her face was wet, and she was shaking hard enough her teeth clacked together. 

Uncle Hamnet. She had to tell Uncle Hamnet.

\---

“My dear, it’s alright! Just a bad dream, my love.”

Rhona had both hands wrapped around her shivering daughter. Someone had summoned her and her husband to the nursery almost immediately. Nerissa would turn seven soon, but had been paralyzed by bouts of terror for years already. The panic had only solidified into these…premonitions recently, and she had no idea what to make of them. Her daughter was shuddering in her lap, and shook her head violently, silver-blonde locks flying. “He cannot go. Many will die, it is not safe! It cannot hold—he cannot save—”

Hands shaking as she clung to her mother’s sleeve, Nerissa choked back another sob. Her father, standing by the bed, made an impatient clicking sound on the roof of his mouth. “The child is unwell. Perhaps we should consult the doctors—”

Rhona sent Erik a look of warning and he bit his tongue, dark violet eyes flashing. She shook her head. They would listen to their daughter, first. 

“Who cannot go, Nerissa?”

“Uncle Hamnet, he cannot go to the garden. Tell him, tell him death awaits.”

“Hamnet?” Her husband’s brow furrowed. His sister-in-law’s twin was a formidable fighter and heir to the legacy of Regalia’s army, but he had been residing within the palace walls for the last month. “He has not seen any combat for at least a fortnight.”

“Rats…the water is too high. Drowning, he will drown,” the frail girl mumbled into a handkerchief, face half hidden in her mother’s blouse.

Erik had the look on his face that indicated they needed to talk where young ears could not hear them. Nerissa was finally quieting, hiccups fading as her eyes closed. The child’s hands were shaking with an unsteady tremble, and the sight of the girl so terrified tore at Rhona’s heart. There were few things so frustrating as feeling like a helpless mother.

When the girl finally succumbed to sleep again, her parents put her to bed and crept quietly out of the room. They converged in their own bedroom down the hall, and were silent for several seconds as Rhona sat on the edge of the bed.

“This is the worst it has gotten. These visions…I do not recall—”

“Visions? They are simply night terrors, nothing less or more.” 

“Terrors, of this specificity? Henry has never suffered from such. I have never heard of a child with this experience.”

“Rhona, what can you possibly propose she is seeing?”

“I know not. But our daughter…she has a gift. Take but a word to Hamnet, won’t you?”

Her husband nodded, but kept the warning to himself. Until a week later, when Solovet issued the order to attack the Garden of Hesperides, a surprise ambush to be kept in utmost secret. Erik tried to catch the young warrior before he left, but it was too late. Hamnet attacked, the dike broke, and war once again assaulted their stone walls.

It was only after Hamnet returned, half-dead and approaching madness, that Nerissa’s parents realized their daughter had not a gift but instead a curse.

\---

Hamnet moved quickly, his pace only slowed by the extra care with which the footsteps were placed. Nerissa padded after him. She had not ever been through the palace so late after her bedtime. She tripped a little on her nightgown as she crept down the hallway, one bare foot thumping against the floor, and her uncle swiveled around with a silent, deadly grace.

Nerissa looked up, hands shaking as her fingers worried at the blanket she had draped over her shoulders and trailed behind her. She did not truly know Hamnet very well. Father seemed to respect him, and Henry called him brave, but what did she know about wielding a sword?

“Do you mean to stop me, child?”

The last few torches left lit on the walls made him look a little scary. Hamnet’s mouth was one straight line. There were dark patches sagging underneath his eyes, ones that Nerissa recognized from when Mother was very tired when she came to tuck her in. Her uncle’s gaze she did not recognize; it was pulled far back into the skull, as if he were not looking fully at her. One last bandage was wrapped around his right shoulder, but Nerissa stared instead at the scars newly formed on his arms, angry bright pink slashes from claws and fangs.

“No,” she finally got out. “No, you must go.”

Hamnet’s face shifted, from that distant unregistering grief tinged with guarded hostility into a sliver of curiosity. “Then why follow me here?”

“I needed to say sorry. I should have told you…told you about the Garden!” Nerissa’s whisper ended on a sharp trill. 

Her uncle approached, kneeling so that they were face to face. “Told me what?”

“I saw it, I saw the water rise. I told Mother and Father. They did not do anything! I should have told you myself. You might not have gone, then.” 

There was a flash of anger inside her. Nerissa knew it was not good to be mad at her own parents, but for some reason they hadn’t talked to her uncle. She had not been jesting, but they had not taken her seriously. 

“How did you see it?”

“In a…” What was the word Mother had used? “In a vision. I saw you there, I knew you shouldn’t go…” Nerissa stopped to wipe at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.

“It’s alright, child, it’s not your fault. Worry you not for me.” 

Uncle Hamnet patted her on the head, palm passing gently over tangled silver locks, then turned away to continue away from his home. 

“Wait! Please! I also saw you in the jungle.”

The man turned, looked back down at the trembling girl.

“There will be a boy with you, he’s old as me. He has only half-Underlander blood. And a big…a big hisser.”

Nerissa could tell from the way Uncle Hamnet was frowning that he thought she was a little crazy. A lot of people looked at her like that these days. She knew the things she saw were horrible, but it made her terribly upset that people didn’t believe her. The dreams were real. Perhaps little girls were not supposed to see the future. Nerissa had not asked for the warnings, and yet they came anyways. 

“Ten years from tomorrow morning, you need to be at the Arch of Tantalus.” 

She had taken extra care to get the name right, so that he would understand. Her visions did not give her names, so she had gone to Vikus, who wanted her call him grandfather even though he was really baby Luxa’s grandfather. She had described to him how the jungle looked, all those terrible bones and the snake-vines, and he had found the right spot for her on the big maps he had.

Hamnet laughed a little, and there were suddenly angry tears in her eyes. “In ten years? Child, I could be anywhere in ten years.”

“Ten years from tomorrow morning,” she emphasized, running a few steps forward and taking a large calloused hand in her two small ones. “You will not be far. The hisser can take you to the Arch.”

“I do not think that—”

She gave the warrior’s palm a very sharp squeeze. “Promise me! Promise me that you will try to be there, please!”

She was sniffling again now. Nerissa was getting too old to cry so much but he just wasn’t _listening_. She could feel in her stomach that if he was not there on time, more bad things would happen. 

Hamnet sighed, his very distant gaze softening. “Alright, alright. Nerissa, I promise. Okay?”

She nodded. It was all she could ask him to do. But he needed to leave now, so she said goodbye and walked back to her own bed. Mother would be cross, after all, if she saw her awake so late at night.

\---

_A flash of fangs, a claw ripping through soft flesh. The blood poured out thickly, nearly gushing, except there was not much more to lose now. Thin translucent eyelids twitched, and a purple gaze went vacant. There was a course scream from a man’s throat—Nerissa looked up to see her father, face streaked with grime and blood, face contorted in grief. He did not look himself. A silver sword flashed as he charged the half-dozen rats standing over his dead wife. There was the sound of scraping, the snap of bone, and then a ripping sound._

Nerissa opened her eyes to the breeze coming off of the Waterway. Luxa’s hand was clutched her own, and Henry was off in front of them on their left, a grey statue of the bright, mischievous boy they knew. They were all on the dock, waiting. 

At the sound of the approaching procession, they all turned. Nerissa glanced at Vikus and Solovet, standing behind them close to the entrance to the dock. He was clutching a handkerchief, the other hand around his wife whose face was the likeness of the stone wall behind her. Solovet was dressed in a full set of armor, knuckles white on the hilt of the sword at her hip. Their daughters were standing next to them, Judith’s hands on Luxa’s shoulders. Aunt Susanna had flown over from the fount for the funeral. 

Eight people were approaching from the long corridor in the palace and stepping onto the dock. Four each were holding a raft made of plant fibers. The rafts were draped in banners, long purple sheets with the city’s heraldry embroidered in gold, that covered the bodies of her parents. They had only been allowed to see the faces after the corpses had been cleaned. Henry had been livid, but Nerissa had already seen what used to be Mother and Father. She saw it every time she closed her eyes.

Nerissa had tried to warn them. She had seen them die, over and over again, and told them to stay in the palace, but again they had not listened. It had been a surprise attack. They had been headed back to the city; their daughter had known they would never make it that far.

The people carrying the rafts set them at the edge of the dock. It was filled with a small crowd outside of the family as well, but Nerissa paid them no attention. Uncle Lukas, Luxa’s father, stepped forward to chant a few stanzas of Sandwich’s farewell poem over his dead brother and sister-in-law. She and Henry stepped forward, then, and each placed an unlit torch in the holders at the front of the rafts. Their uncle lit them one at a time as the rafts were placed in the river. The flame danced. These special torches had been made to burn, but burn slowly. Nerissa followed the two beacons of light as they burned brighter and brighter, the fire catching onto the rafts and setting the entire craft ablaze atop the water, casting light in an arc over the dark walls of the tunnel. Smoke drifted behind them.

Henry’s shoulders were shaking slightly. Nerissa looked sideways at his profile, angled away from those who had come to pay their respects. She saw the fire reflecting off of his wet cheeks as his fists clenched at his sides. Nerissa stood next to him, eyes rimmed in red but very dry. After months of mourning, she was out of tears now, drained of them. 

\---

“Come, Nerissa, I want to show you something.”

She looked up from the folds of mother’s cloak in her hands to see Vikus standing in the doorway. He must have tried to get her attention several times, but she had been somewhere else. Another vision, another prophesied stage with players as of yet unknowing of their own fate. Vikus stepped forward, gently collected the cloth she was clutching at and draped it over her shoulders. His voice was very, very gentle. 

“I know your brother and cousin have been spending much time together, out in the arena. I know it is not your inclination, such distractions. I was hoping to show you a place that may yet bring you comfort.”

They set off through the large stone fortress, that lately had felt more a prison than a home. After only a few turns down the hallways, Vikus stopped at a polished wooden door. Nerissa had passed it many times. It was an oddity in their buildings, but had become more of a fixture for her, something akin to a tapestry that never changed. As she watched, the head of the Regalian Council pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. 

The room was one of the smallest Nerissa had seen in the palace, more a large closet than a space for living. It was strangely geometric, a cube in shape. Vikus raised the torch and cast it on the walls, revealing words chiseled on every surface in irregular blocks. The paragraphs of text were everywhere: walls, ceiling, floor. By the unshapely letters and uneven spacing, it was obvious they had been chipped in by hand. 

“This is the Prophecy Room,” Vikus said. 

Nerissa had heard of it, but never really made the connection. The way the adults occasionally mentioned prophecies, she had assumed they had been scrolls kept in some back room. Besides, they always looked very uncomfortable whenever a prophecy was brought up around her. She had thought she cared little for words by someone long dead; they spoke of old wars and champions, did they not? She did not see battlefields; she saw only flashes of pain. 

But this—this was something else entirely. Bartholomew of Sandwich must have spent years in this room, contorted around the angles of the compact stone to ensure his predictions were preserved for centuries to come. She stepped up to a wall, eyes drinking in the indentations. The slant of the letters, the way the lines ran into each other and sidled away from the right angles of the room—she recognized the desperation there, that clawing grasp to hold onto the omens entwined with the need to run from them entirely. They were the writings of a mad man, and the realization made her shiver. What did it say about her, that she felt strangely at home in this cramped space filled with the silent, haunting voice of a ghost?

“He left these here,” Nerissa whispered. “For us?”

“I think he wanted his decedents to know of the fate that would await them,” Vikus answered. “I had wanted to keep it from you children, but it seems very little I do can shield you entirely from tragedy. I thought perhaps you would appreciate the words of someone else who had true vision.”

Nerissa exhaled a slow breath. Vikus believed her, he actually trusted that what she saw would come to pass. And he wanted to show her what else she may yet see, passed from the mind of Sandwich and onto her. She approached one small lamp set into the wall, the only other light in the room illuminating a single prophecy.

“What be the meaning of this?”

“We have yet to parse those particular verses. It is called the Prophecy of Gray.”

Nerissa took a closer look at the four parts, the crooked language. “And you wanted me to read it?”

“I wanted you to take a look for us, Nerissa. With the aid of your talents, it may be that we have better luck at cracking its meaning.”

She ran a finger over the panel, feeling a flame of hope inside her that was a twin of the oil lamp on the wall. There were words that Vikus had not said. That if they could figure out this prophecy, then maybe they could avoid another unnecessary death. If she could make sense of these words, she might just save the people Sandwich had tried to protect.

Nerissa nodded, turned to Vikus to offer just the hint of a smile. 

“Thank you, Grandfather."


End file.
